A hilarious video is the centerpiece of the web site, but it can be doubted whether this is actually going to be an effective one… it is too funny to be taken seriously perhaps.

“Most victims suffer from serious damage to their eyes, but yours are completely intact! Unfortunately though, we had to replace another part of your face…”

See the youtube copy of the video in case the site itself is not available:

Take care this new year’s eve!
Eric

What does a Nintendo wireless controller have to do with Slackware?

Well… you’d be surprised!

On october 4th I am running a presentation about “A history of Slackware development” as part of T-DOSE (fyi: T-DOSE is a free and yearly event held in The Netherlands to promote use and development of Open Source Software). One of the other speakers is Dag Wieers, a former IBM collegue and a big name in the RPM and Redhat world. Dag is going to present his software “wiipresent” and when I read that, my curiosity was triggered. I own a Nintendo Wii (or rather, my son does) and I am interested in things that you can do with it apart from playing cool games.

Wiipresent is a small linux program that connects your computer to a Wiimote (the Wii’s wireless controller) over a bluetooth link and enables you to use the controller as a pointing device. Of course Dag is going to bring a Wiimote to the conference, but so am I

Wiipresent  turned out to be extremely easy to use and the variety of buttons and the diirectional cross on the controller are all functional. The cool thing is that it uses the tilt function of the Wiimote to move the mouse pointer across your screen. So, by waving the Wiimote I can steer and control my KDE desktop, and the directional cross will be useful when I give my presentation – it allows me to move forward and backward through the slides.

And since bluetooth is used instead of infrared, I can walk around without the need to point that Wiimote to the big screen.

And this all from a program that was born as a demonstrational hack at another conference. I created some packages for Slackware 13.0 (both 32bit and 64bit) which you can obtain from my repository as usual: wiipresent and libwiimote (a required supporting library).

Have fun trying it out! Eric

Edit 09-oct-2009:

I have uploaded a PDF of my T-Dose presentation (as well as the original Tex plus bitmap files used to create that PDF). They are available at http://slackware.com/~alien/tdose2009/ .

I came across a nice one-liner just now. The “binary calculator” or bc is a powerful UNIX tool. Calculating the value of PI with an arbitrary number of decimals (the number of decimals only restricted by the power of your OS, available RAM or internal limitations of the program) goes like this:

echo “scale=XXXX;4*a(1)” | bc -l

Where “XXXX” is the number of digits you want to calculate. Calling bc with the “-l” parameter causes bc to load it’s mathematical library. The function “a()” is the arctangent function.

Let’s say you need the value of PI with an accuracy of a thousand decimals.

$ echo "scale=1000;4*a(1)" | bc -l

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307\

81640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058\

22317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644\

28810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610\

45432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925\

40917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572\

70365759591953092186117381932611793105118548074462379962749567351885\

75272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639522473719\

07021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271\

45263560827785771342757789609173637178721468440901224953430146549585\

37105079227968925892354201995611212902196086403441815981362977477130\

99605187072113499999983729780499510597317328160963185950244594553469\

08302642522308253344685035261931188171010003137838752886587533208381\

42061717766914730359825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778\

18577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201988

Isn’t this fun? And on my old dual P2/233MHz server, this took roughly eight seconds.

Now, to compare the usefulness of the Linux platform to good old Solaris, this is what you get on Solaris 8:

$ echo "scale=1000;4*a(1)" | bc -l
scale factor is too large
3.14159265358979323844

Cheers, Eric